Capacity of storage drives in computer systems, such as servers is often underutilized. Drive manufacturers tend to maintain the average selling price of a drive while increasing capacity through the use of technological advances. Therefore, it is often not practical to reduce the system cost, even if storage demands do not increase as offered capacity increases. In some applications, it is beneficial to share a drive across multiple servers. In conventional systems, a storage controller is used to implement volume management and carve out volumes from shared drives.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.